The ecogenetics and ecogenomics of plant-herbivore interactions: rapid progress on a slippery road

The -omics era has brought together two traditionally quite distinct disciplines in the study of plant-herbivore interactions: ecology and molecular biology. Microarrays, in particular, appeared to be the matchmakers between these, but proteomics and metabolomics also found roles to play. We show how they have dramatically enriched our appreciation of the massive metabolic reconfigurations that take place when herbivores eat plants and explain where they fall short in revealing how plants optimize the allocation of fitness-limiting resources among growth, defense, and tolerance responses while competing with other plants in nature. While the first offspring from this partnership between ecology and molecular biology searched for the 'master plan' of plant-herbivore interactions, the next generation now celebrates the diversity of outcomes that result from the co-evolutionary process.